


Cascade

by fandumbandflummery



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gen, fun with weather, introspection time with the death watch, sort of???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 11:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10740783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandumbandflummery/pseuds/fandumbandflummery
Summary: Bo-Katan starts to act a bit weird during heavy weather. Pre is mystified and annoyed by her behavior - at first.





	Cascade

**Author's Note:**

> I always thought that despite the fact that she grew up in massive palaces and climate-controlled cities of high-tech glass and steel, Bo-Katan is extremely tough and resilient to harsh conditions and hard living. I found it was an interesting contrast to Satine’s leaning towards luxury and comfort.  
> And it has been a goal to write meta about how this would’ve affected Bo-Katan’s environmental sensitivity and how she felt about rather mundane things like weather, the elements etc. Idk how well I did it here but its a topic that’ll come up again someday I am sure.

For the final weeks of the Zanbar monsoon, nearly everyone has resigned themselves to siting inside the doorways of their tents, glaring resentfully at the endless sheets of rain imprisoning them. Even Pre is at his wits end, and for all that he loves this planet for its wilderness, the constant rain and thunderstorms are starting to drive him and most of the Death Watch barking mad. 

Everyone that is, except for Bo-Katan, who bizarrely seems more energetic and cheerful the more angry everyone else gets. The grouchier soldiers had cornered Bo-katan earlier and attempted to shake her down for whatever drugs she was evidently enjoying the cheering effects of, but she’d brushed them off and skipped away into the storm, laughing.

She hadn’t bothered to switch off the proximity tracker in her armour, blinking blue on the HUD of his visor, so she clearly didn’t want to vanish. This time, Pre resolved to follow her and find out just why, following her into the maze of stones that nearly vanish in the heavy rain. 

He’s partly thankful for a distraction at last from just sitting in his tent and tweaking his armour or running through sword drills, but he's also mildly paranoid that she really is up to something - and if it's anything that would warrant use of the Darksaber. The deadly heirloom is holstered safely in his pack as he scales the sheer cliff, for once forgoing the use of his jets in favor of stealth. 

They’d relocated to the rocky hill overlooking their old settlement to keep out of the reach of flash floods, the camp now spread out over several plateaus, with the larger warships safely landed on another hillock. Bo’s signal is leading Pre on an upwards climb - no small feat on bare stone, even for a Mandalorian’s skill and equipment - to the base of the great pillar of rock in the centre of the mountain. The HUD signal draws him to a large crack, opening into a tunnel big enough to admit a person. The end of the tunnel is screened with a thin cascade of water that parts over his armour as he steps into the space beyond.

It’s something like a tall cavern - Pre had known the top of the rock had been hollow but as to the extent of the inner cave, he’d had no idea until now. The roof must be eroded and cracked, for all around him are cascades of water, flat and thin like ray shields, that fall downwards before running off in a multitude of shallow streams all across the floor and vanishing into some unseen reservoir that he’ll really have to go hunting for another day when he’s not as distracted.

And Pre IS distracted, because next to one stream is Bo-Katan, laying on her side on the water-smoothed stone floor and stripped to her underwear. Her armour is neatly piled in a stack by her feet, and she idly trails her fingers through one of the miniature rivers running by. Pre is glad for his visor to hide the rising colour in his face - Bo-Katan IS his second-in-command but kriff - she’s also a gorgeous woman wearing not a whole lot in the way of clothes and well, he’s not made of stone.

“Found my secret base, I see. Come to shank me for being crazy and weird and driving the verda nuts, or d'you want to talk?” she says with her usual deadpan tone, barely looking away from the pattern of ripples her hand is making in the stream.

“If I was going to kill you for acting crazy I would’ve shot you the day we met,” Pre replies, managing to tear his eyes away from Bo-Katan's body and looking around at his environment.

“How’d you find *this* place?”

“Failed hunting trip. The fat lil’ lizard I was after ran into a crack int the hills and I went after it. Lost the thing but I found this place. It was kinda boring then but since the rains, it’s gotten more fun,” Bo-Katan says, as she kicks her feet in a deeper section of the stream.

“Why did you come back?”

“It seemed like a great place for getting away from nosy Mand'alors,” she smirks, getting up and stretching, before sauntering away a short distance with her back to him, stopping in front of a sheetlike cascade of water. She bends over - a bit more than necessary, Pre thinks - apparently to check her reflection in the dim light on the water’s surface.

“Kryze, seriously.”

“Aww Boss, you wouldn’t wanna know the real reason why,” she replies, overly sweet in her tone, still not bothering to even turn around. Now he’s starting to get annoyed.

“And why wouldn’t I?” Pre growls.

“Cos, it’s weird and silly and I know you, you’re not into that osik,” she sing-songs her reply. But when he keeps standing there and pointedly does not leave, Bo-Katan makes a frustrated noise and scrubs her hands down her face before turning back and stomping - as best as she can in bare feet - further away, back towards her gear.

“Urgh. Look, Vizsla; you know me better. I’m not doing anything treasonous. You can check my comms and transmission histories, I’ve not sent a thing to anyone,” she huffs, gesturing to her piled gear. Pre ignores it and starts after her until she whirls around and glares at him, green eyes fairly blazing now and uncannily locking with his own hidden behind the visor.

“You know what, forget it. Look, I’ll come back with you to the camp,” she snarls and starts tugging on her flight suit while Pre is still desperately trying to re-assess the situation - Bo-Katan angry might be more of a problem than Bo-Katan being irreverent and strange - before he decides to throw caution to the wind with a plan that could either ruin everything or work. Bo’ is almost done reattaching her armour plates, with her back turned to Pre, when he reaches out and she stops and goes stiff.

Even though his own instincts and Bo’s body language are screaming at him to take a hike before he loses a vital organ or two, Pre decides against his own judgement to do…what, he’s not quite sure. He sits down beside her, back to a nearby boulder, and takes off his helmet. These things tend to work better when actual eyes are making contact, in his experience.

“I can see I’ve upset you,” he says, quietly, “and I know you weren’t doing anything traitorous. And if you don’t want to tell me why you like playing around here or standing out in the rain you don’t have yo. But,” he pauses, looking as if the words will appear in mid air for him to read, “all the same I’d like to know. Cos I’m interested. In…why you do. And you. I mean, why you’re you? Ahh, fek…”

Bo-Katan thankfully seems to have not noticed him babbling towards the end, because she visibly deflates with a sigh, sliding to down with a bump to the ground next to Pre. She's close enough to him that their shoulder guards connect with a bright metallic noise that echoes in the cavern, and looks uncharacteristically nervous as she twists a strand of red hair around a finger and tries to avoid his eyes.

“I guess it's like...growing up on Kalevala, I was rarely allowed outside the ducal palace grounds, let alone outside the cube cities. Which made sense, the planet’s surface is mostly volcanic, all lava flows and boiling pools of toxic chemical sludge. And - its not like I had no room to run, the palace was huge and the cities all got tunnels and speeder lines and stuff connecting them,” she sighs, leaning back, arms behind her head.

“The rest of the family were fine with the palace, but I liked a lot of the big indoor gardens and courtyards - even the water purifying fountains in the city proper.”

Pre has to chuckle a bit at that image. “Nice. Little Bo'ika, agog at the wonders of public sanitation.” Bo just rolls her eyes and continues.

“Everything was climate-controlled and regulated and comfortable. I can’t say I liked it or that I hated it, its just that I’d never felt anything else. And being a kid, I just didn’t question it. The point is that I grew up without ever feeling so much as a light breeze or a chill,” she leans forward, reaching out into the cascade, “or rain.”

She pauses for a while, watching as the water runs up her arm, encasing armor and fabric alike in moving silvery smoothness almost all the way to her shoulder, before letting her arm fall back to her side.

“It wasn’t till the war that I learned what being at the mercy of the elements really meant - living in the camps on the rim worlds, being sunburned and windburned, having to trek over bad roads instead of riding in a closed speeder - all of that. I hated every minute of it. I nearly froze to death during those last months on Werda, and I was barely there when they finally installed Sati- the Duchess, proper, in Sundari.”

Pre nods. He remembers the day well - the two of them standing among the assembled great and good, ranged behind the throne as the new Duchess made her address. Allies united in the great work of bringing Mandalore into a new golden age. He smirks inwardly - he had at least had been genuine in his intentions, even if his methods didn’t quite conform to the New regime’s ideals. Half of that original staff had to be jail on corruption charges by now, or dead thanks to his - and Bo’s - efforts.

“But the thing was, once I was *living* in Sundari, not feeling weather or wind or anything…it stood out more. Made feel like I wasn’t really there, that I just sorta existed,” she pokes at the tiny rivulet running by her right foot with a steel toed boot.

“I started feeling really low, and I’d jump on any excuse that meant I’d get to feel wind or sun or anything - trips to the other worlds, going around in open speeders - even stuck my head out the ventilation grates of the palace once and got a faceful of sand for my trouble.”

“I felt the same way about that place - Sundari, I mean - whenever I had to go,” Pre murmurs, “I never could get why people would want to live indoors their whole life. It’d drive you mad after a while.”

“Mhm,” Bo continues, “and y'see, when the rain started and we went up the mountain in the downpour I just…I’m just a bit awed, that’s all. I’ve never seen rain or water fall so heavy and so…everywhere at once. I got a bit giddy and it just hasn’t gone away,” she looks up at him, downright sheepishly. Pre can’t stop himself grinning at bit at her totally un-Bo-like reticence.

“Nothing wrong with being a bit in love with the elements, Bo-Katan.”

“Easy for you to say. You were *raised* old-school Mando,” she leans back against the boulder, and dips her hand back into the fall. 

Pre can’t think of anything else to add to that, so he does the same, pretending not to notice her watching his face as he watches the silvery stream run up his arm. 

They sit in silence for a long while, with nothing but the noise of the cascades and the faint drumming of the rain on the distant roof of the cavern. Even as the thin daylight fades and the cavern darkens from dusk to pitch darkness, they barely move, although Bo begins to lean more and more heavily on Pre, until her head is resting on one armoured shoulder. 

At some point they must’ve fallen asleep, because the pale dawn light that manages to slip down through the cracked ceiling of the cavern is enough to wake Pre. He feels a weight on his legs that wasn’t there before - and after realizing that is he is mercifully not being held down by enemy bonds, he looks down and sees Bo-Katan stretched across his lap, still asleep, silky red hair free from its steel band and freely speed across her face and his legs. On reflex, he brings one of his hands up to stroke through a section of her hair - of course it’s reflex, he thinks, isn’t’ that normally what one does when a pretty woman is asleep on one’s lap?

A slight tug on a knot that formed during the night is enough to stir Bo-Katan out of her sleep, however, and he quickly pulls his hand away. Blearily, Bo-Katan props herself up a bit on her elbows, green eyes blinking sleepily - questioningly, up at Pre.

Completely on impulse, bends down and kisses her.

And he thanks whatever gods are left still looking out for the Mandalorians that she kisses him back instead of snapping his neck.


End file.
